The Stronger Men by Y. A.
Fire, ash, flak and bombardments.
In one hand, I carry my child. In the other, I hold my patients. One of the nurses who worked in the hospital with me limped behind. Dil, I think, was her name. Between the smoke and debris, my arms soak in shaded crimson. Light is lacking within the area, from the corner of my eye, at least. My enemies have their clear vision, but they are blind in judgement.
“Where’s Doctor Fouad?” Dil’s queries lure me away from my target, the shelter across the brick-ridden village spins in impossible circles. I’m hallucinating.
“Maryam, where is Doctor Fouad?”
“I don’t know!”
My child loosens themselves from my clutch.
“I do not know, Dil,” I repeat. “He is lost. Like all the others.”
Dil shakes her head. Her mind is hollow. Like all the other men, whose minds have been deprecated by bullets and fear.
I held her back from falling into the dark red cement, I said she was holding us back from reaching the safe house. She can no longer hear me. I reach for my flask to calm her down but, in doing so, I accidentally let loose the other children, including my own. With no strength to chase after them, nor to call for them, I collapse onto the ground.
I weep.
Perhaps, I’ve been thinking about myself too much.
Is this His punishment? No. I was a good woman, a good nurse, a righteous mother. No. Not anymore. My child is lost somewhere within these battlegrounds, succumbing to the heat and the tanks of the stronger men.
No. He will survive, He is on my side. We are victims. They are villains.
Hold me… Where is the ménage, my home, my family, that once bathed in my love and healed in my bed? I yearn to hold Dil but as I look back, I realise she is gone. A dirty knife in her hands. An opening in her chest.
I’ve known the other doctors for as far as I can remember. Adopting me from the ill treatment of my past family, a father who would use his fists, and a mother who was mute. The medical field was a passage I had thought was always closed for me, I never realised how much I could learn from simply stepping up into the light and opening my eyes. I barely knew Dil. She was small, naïve, and careless. She spent her off days in search of wine and indulged herself in party tricks. But I still blamed myself for her death.
I would normally call someone pathetic to lose control and rot in their own guilt. In this barrage, however, no one is as pathetic as the one who still considers themselves in the graveyard of martyrs.
And yet, I still beg for another soul in my arms.
My beseeching for salvation drowned out as I slowly lost my vision and became blind in both eyes. Numb within the bounds of my heart.
Maybe, I was not hallucinating after all, maybe the safehouse really is spinning in circumference. With all the little sight I have left, I watch my hospital die. A giant— No, that is not the right word. There is no right word. Whatever it is—it has killed my humanity. The world outside my home is a blur to me and it seems like we are a blur to them, too. That becomes clear once the unnamable weapon clears the front skies.
A political destroyer. Never learnt it in school. No textbooks showed pictures of giant steel engines with wings and cannons. We thought we were safe.
I peek at the vehicle.
Numbers and letters. That is all it is. The destroyer of all life, numbers, and letters.
But it kills.
God, it kills.
And it watches my hospital die. Die within the smoke. The smoke of the stronger men.
Yashra A.
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